A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

155 Kim Woods 7 154 was not designated a saint. It may perhaps have been a statue of Rudolph of Habsburg (1218-1291), one of the founders of the Austrian empire eventually ruled by Maximilian I (1459-1519). A statue of this Rudolph appears on ­ Maximilian’s mausoleum in the Hofkirche at Innsbruck among the twenty- eight larger than life-size bronze statues of ancestors and warriors made between 1513 and 1533. The pose is comparable even if not identical with the Scarisbrick Kni ght. 28 If it is indeed the Rudolph from the accounts, it seems possible that as early as the 1830s someone involved in the sale had already made the connection with this famous series of dynastic statues and named the statue accordingly, but it is unlikely to have been Pugin, who does not seem ever to have visited Innsbruck. The identification is not necessarily­ correct – nineteenth-century identifications frequently were not. The Innsbruck scheme was of bronze, but dynastic statues could also be of wood. In 1440 Jorys the woodcarver (‘beeldsnyder’) was commissioned by Margaret of Bavaria (1374-1441), Dowager Countess of Holland and Hainaut, to make a polychromed wooden statue of a woman to go with others represent- ing the counts and countesses of Holland in the chapel at The Hag ue. 29 The statue presumably depicted either Margaret herself or her daughter ­ Jacqueline, who predeceased her in 1436. By 1440 the rule of Holland had been lost to Philip the Good, so keeping up the series of ancestor statues has an air of defiant dynastic pride. There were also more modest schemes in parish churches. The parish church of Neufra south of Stuttgart, founded in 1517 by Schweikart von Gundelfingen, contains a signed and dated wooden statue by Niklaus Weckmann inscribed as Stefan von Gundelfingen, perhaps to be identified as the brother of Schweikart, and a second dynastic figure of sandstone belatedly claimed to be Schweikart’s un cle. 30 Th e figure of Stefan, like the Scarisbrick Knight, is large-scale, armoured and carved in the round; it stands on a small console against the eastern-most pillar of the family chapel. Although geographically far removed from the Guelders-Limburg area where the Elsloo workshop(s) operated, the Weckmann statue shows that minor ­ territorial rulers might also commission secular dynastic statues for family chapels: a possible context for the Liverpool Knight. A much grander and more public series of dynastic statues was commis- sioned for the new courtyard known as the Balienhof (built 1513-1521), in front of the Coudenberg palace in Brussels. Arguably the scheme might be seen as dynastic propaganda begun during the minority of Charles V under the influence of his unpopular grandfather Maximilian I. Of the eighty octagonal columns thirty were to bear bronze statues of dukes and duchesses of Brabant. Designs were made by Jan van Roome in 1510, the wooden mod- els by Jan Borman around 1511-1513 and the bronze statues were cast by Renier van Thie nen. 31 A tapestry of Bathsheba noticed by King David, made in Brussels around 1515-1525 is thought to record the intended appearance of the sche me. 32 Im portantly, the wooden models were to be cleaned up and poly- chromed for display somewhere in the great hall of the palace or elsewhere, another indication of a possible context for a secular, wooden ancestor stat ue. 33 De signed to be placed on columns, the Balienhof statues would, like the Liverpool Knight, have been designed for a 360° viewing arc. Some also